IT was a bustling Saturday evening in downtown Algiers, and as the Rue d'Isly swirled with last minute shoppers, there was a sharp explosion. When the smoke lifted, there lay underneath a shattered car all that was left of a 16-year-old Moslem who had held on to his grenade too long. Unnoticed among the curious crowd that gathered, a soberly dressed, respectable-looking, middle-aged Frenchwoman quickly bent down and picked up one of the dead terrorist's severed fingers. Putting it in her handbag, she snapped the clasp and slipped away.
There is still hatred in Algeria, but increasingly it is the isolated, furtive exception of the Frenchwoman rather than the general fever that prevailed before De Gaulle stepped in a year ago. Two years ago the explosion in the Rue d'Isly would have brought the paratroopers out in force, perhaps led to dozens of arrests, or might have set European mobs to rioting against Moslems in reprisal for terrorist outrages. But last month, an hour after the grenade blast, the crowds on the Rue d'Isly were as thick as ever; most Europeans looked upon the wreckage and passed by, as if it had simply been a ghastly accident. And this changed attitude is not all on the European side. A month before, a terrorist was spotted before he could explode a bomb in a crowded square; he fled with a mob in hot pursuit, and was caught and nearly killed as people banged his skull against a wall. Remarkably, most of the mob were Moslems.
"Les Affaires." "Papa's Algeria is finished," said Charles de Gaulle recently. The changes that began with De Gaulle's social and economic promises to the Moslems, and with an improved military situation, are visible everywhere, reports TIME Correspondent Edward Behr, who first went to Algeria on assignment in 1952, and has returned often since. The barbed wire has come down. No longer is everyone frisked before entering any cinema, shop or hotel.
Army patrols still make periodic rounds, and Moslem taxi drivers must have their passengers fill out special destination forms if they are to be taken outside the city limits. But in Algiers' dark, conspiratorial bistros, the talk these days is more likely to be about "les affaires" than assassinations. De Gaulle has made the army his chief economic arm in raising Moslem living standards, and fat army contracts for roads and schools—plus Saharan oil investments—have spread a new prosperity across Algeria.
Algiers, Bōne, Oran and the villages on the oil route to Hassi Messaoud are booming. From Algiers to Bordj-bou-Arréridj (a town in an area where the rebels are still active), the highway thunders with big trucks carrying pipeline equipment. A year ago, from Palestro onward—the rebel zone—the same road was almost deserted. The astonishing thing now is that mingling with the steady stream of trucks are families, both European and Moslem, in private cars, ignoring the charred remains of a car by the roadside and taking in stride the signs warning motorists not to stop and that the road is closed after 6:30 at night.